Ira Hayes, Cowboys, Horses, Dogs

HUM 221 students --

In class the other day, we listened to a cover of "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" by a singer-songwriter from San Antonio named Tom Russell, who has a home page you might want to give a listen to when you're on a computer with a sound card. Here's some more information on Russell and his version of the song, in case it helps you with the "listener response" essays I've assigned for Monday. If you need to see the lyrics again, covers by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan are available on the internet.

Russell's version of Ira Hayes is on his CD "Indians Cowboys Horses Dogs." He introduces the song with a monolog, in which he talks about an Osage Indian chief named Bacon Rind, who was immortalized in a series of give-away drinking glasses during the 1950s, and Chief Seattle, who is known for a famous speech in the mid-19th century.

Bacon Rind lived from 1860 to 1932, and he was principal chief of the Osage Nation during the early 20th century. He was immortalized in a set of Acee glasses given away with a fill-up at Knox Oil Co. gas stations in Oklahoma during the 1950s. You can usually find a picture by looking for Knox Indian Glassware on eBay. Talk about commodification!

Chief Seattle wasn't a chief, and his speech may never have been given. But he was a leader of the Salish Indians around Puget Sound, and the city of Seattle was named for him. Dated in 1854, the speech wasn't written down till it appeared in a newspaper account written in 1887 by a Seattle physician who heard the speech 30 years earlier. Its historical accuracy has been sharply questioned, by an archivist who has studied the available written records, and a heavily romanticized, New Age-y version appeared in the 1960s. So we've got commodification with the Bacon Rind glasses, and expropriation with Chief Seattle's speech. Whatever its origin, both versions have gone into popular culture.

In his song, titled "Bacon Rind-Chief Seattle-Ballad of Ira Hayes," songwriter Russell quotes from the 1887 version of Chief Seattle's speech:

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. Your religion was written upon tablets of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never comprehend or remember it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors -- the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

There's also a brief MP3 sound clip available on line.

A footnote: Most of the material on the internet identifies Peter LaFarge, who wrote "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," as a "Naragaset" Indian. There are good biographies on a Bob Dylan fan website put up in Germany and Wikipedia online, user-written encyclopedia. But I suspect it's a misspelling of the Naragansett tribe, who lived in what is now Rhode Island during the 1600s. The Encyclopedia of Native Music (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2005) flatly says he was Naragansett.